Some notes made on the subway

A screw
A small screw dangles by a thread from the long flourescent light fixture of the Moscow subway, unnoticed by the mass of people swirling beneath. It is just a few feet from a mass of fiery red fluffy curls, but does not fall despite the promised soft landing. Instead with each sway and and rattle of the car, it rubs a track into the side of the light casement, determined to leave a mark.

Drunks
Whenever I bump into drunks on the metro I am very shocked by a very peculiar dense deadness in their limbs. It's as if somewhere in the outskirts of the city there is a drunk factory- where there are plastercine models of men hunched up at bench height, clutching bottles or smooshed into the three-person bench of the metro car for a snooze- and into these models pure concrete is poured. The concrete forms are suited up and sent out, but no ammount of layers can mask the completely solid form beneath. They are like giant boulders, rolling around this weird urban wilderness. I'm sometimes surprised they don't crush the benches of snap off the spindley metro fixtures. It's strangely paradoxical that the wind, snow and hunger pains should produce such solid beings. I imagine myself under such conditions withering up, brittling up and disintigrating into the wind. But for some reason nature has chosen to make living monuments out of these subjects, removing all softness and suppleness fashioning a completely solid core.